This Is An Interesting Discussion To Have Tbh And I Like Getting To Hear Other Chronically Ill People’s

this is an interesting discussion to have tbh and i like getting to hear other chronically ill people’s thoughts on it! same thing applies for my rambles here, not saying this to invalidate your experiences or your perspective, just want to share my own thoughts on it since i didn’t rly add anything to it before haha

i think a lot of this honestly just depends on the person and the chronic illness. different illnesses obviously have different symptoms and different people experience things to different levels of severity. so i’m def not by any means saying no chronically ill person can or does have good grades, bc that would be factually false and ableist.

i’ve had almost perfect grades up until this point in my college degree, to the detriment of my own health like remus may have, but this academic year is honestly a lot harder on me for reasons im unsure of—i think some of it is a cumulative effect though, and im only doing a 4-year degree compared to the 7 years of Hogwarts. plus, this is not mentioning my high school career, in which i got Ds in most of my classes and missed so many days of school i nearly didn’t pass high school at all just based on attendance. we don’t even know if there’s an attendance requirement at hogwarts! but in a modern day college or high school au there might be.

there’s also the fact that hogwarts is huge, and has a ton of stairs with, canonically at least, no elevators or ramps, meaning he’d have to use more energy on a daily basis than a lot of us in the modern real world have to with ADA (this is not to say all campuses are accessible, but a lot are at least partially so). there’s the fact that some of the classes, like DADA, are a lot more physically involved than the classes many college students are taking in the real modern world. and going back to the attendance itself, we don’t know if hogwarts grades on attendance but a lot of modern day public schools require attendance and if you miss too many days you cannot move on regardless of grades. as for college, a lot of professors at smaller universities grade on attendance and hogwarts seems to have relatively small class sizes. so if professors aren’t willing to be flexible on that? his grades would be shit just from sheer number of absences.

then there’s the fact that remus may not be old but he has been ill for a very long time, having been bitten so young. if we think of lycanthropy as a progressive illness, which seems likely based on various canonical descriptions, it will have had a lot of time already despite his young age.

also what makes lycanthropy different from a lot of real illnesses is the routine nature of the flares. he will have at least one flare every single month. with a lot of real illnesses people can go months without flares when they’re on proper treatment. they’re unpredictable and randomized, you might have twelve one semester and two the next. lycanthropy guarantees he will be sick for at least a day every single month, but likely more (because i don’t think there’s a lot of detail on this in canon but i find it immensely hard to believe that the full moon would only affect him the night of).

and lastly for many chronically ill people success in academia depends quite strongly on how accommodating and flexible professors are. we don’t know much about the marauders era professors iirc, so we don’t know if they’re decent people who would allow him flexible deadlines when he’s ill or not. we don’t know if they’re prejudiced against werewolves and refuse to accommodate one. i might be forgetting some details bc i haven’t read the canon series in many years but even if we meet some of them i know for sure we don’t know them all. plus just because someone seems nice from a 2-minute flashback doesn’t mean they aren’t ableist etc. and depending on the illness, the severity, etc pushing through just is not always physically possible! yes there is a certain extent to which you can ignore your needs and overuse energy you don’t have but it’s not always possible. my brain fog has been really bad this semester. i can force myself to do all the readings for my classes, but i physically cannot force the information to stick in my brain, so going through the motions does shit for my grades. we don’t really know what kinds of symptoms he has but if remus is injured and physically cannot, say, go gather plants from the forest for herbology, or he gets dizzy/lightheaded and cannot brew a potion bc the steam/heat will actually make him pass out, or whatever else, it won’t really matter how hard he tries or wants to push through. to be completely candid about something i’ve not even said out loud yet, i’ve had to give up on my dreams of going to law school because i am physically unable to maintain the grades necessary to get into a decent school, or to do the amount of reading law school entails, despite my best desperate attempts at pushing through even when it’s destroying me mentally and physically.

anyways, as i said this isn’t to negate anything anyone else said, it’s just my own interpretation of things! ultimately we’re working off of very little canon information about this and i’m not here to tell anyone their experiences are wrong. i think it’s a really interesting conversation to have though.

people who think rjl would have really good grades have never been chronically ill and had to miss school consistently because of it. I'm sure he was smart! I'm sure he did really well on tests! but there has never been a character I'm more sure struggled to achieve the academic success that he was capable of.